


Eternity Lies Behind Us

by sub_textual



Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: Angst, Dante tries to change the past: the fic, Don't worry there will be an eventual happy ending no matter how crazy this fic gets, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pre-established Dante/Vergil, Sexual Tension, Slow Burn, Time Travel, Timey-Wimey, eternal recurrence, pre-dmc5
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-04-23 18:26:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19156501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sub_textual/pseuds/sub_textual
Summary: Prior to the events of DMC5, Dante goes on a mission to the ancient city of Parcae, and comes face-to-face with Janus, the god of time, beginnings, endings, and pathways. He incurs the god's wrath and soon finds himself standing again on a certain cliff in Temen-ni-gru, twenty-four years in the past.---Or:Dante tries to change the past, the fic.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> “From this gateway moment, a long, eternal lane runs _back:_ an eternity lies behind us.”  
> \- Friedrich Nietzsche, _Thus Spoke Zarathrustra_
> 
> Beta'd by [sootandshadow](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/sootandshadow) and [vorokis](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/vorokis)

The beginning of the end started with a fall.

Dante stood at the edge of an abyss and watched his whole world fall. Watched as everything he’d ever loved — his reason for breath — slipped away from him forever, plummeting into the dark finality of oblivion.

He should have followed him, but he didn’t. Should’ve fought harder, but he hadn’t. And all he had left of his world in the end was a broken heart and a slashed, bloody glove; the crushing weight of loss and an emptiness that he would carry for the rest of his life. It was an absence that hollowed him out, until it was all he knew — the depth of his mourning, and the emptiness inside him that was once filled by his brother. 

He never thought he would find himself here again, standing on a cliff twenty-four years in the past. 

And there, young and beautiful and alive, is Vergil. 

*

**6 HOURS EARLIER**

It should’ve been an easy mission, a quick job that would’ve resulted in enough cash to turn the lights back on for a month. 

“You’ll be back in time for dinner,” Morrison had promised earlier that morning, standing in a patch of sunlight that poured through the windows. “It’s an easy job, Dante. You could sure as hell use it.”

“I dunno, Morrison,” Dante had said as he worked on a slice of pizza, ambivalent about having to get out of his chair to kill something that wouldn’t even put up a decent fight. “I’m not really feeling the idea of doing pest control.” 

“I don’t know if I’d call it _pest control_ ,” said Morrison. “Horse wrangling might be a better term for it.” 

Dante straightened up at that, a small sliver of interest sliding between his ribs. “What kinda horse are we talkin’ about, anyway?” 

“The kind that’s big and nasty and demonic. I hear it’s causing all sorts of mischief, creating quite a temporal mess out in Parcae.” 

“Well, why didn’t ya say so before? That sounds like my kinda gig!” 

Parcae was a city lost in time. It was a relic of the Old World, of an era long past. It was said that the god Janus had built the city, his footsteps forming the tight, curving cobblestone streets. His hands shaped the bricks of the great walls that surrounded the city and carved out soaring parapets. 

The people of Parcae eschewed electricity and the comforts of modernity. 

Dante always found it kind of weird, but he wasn’t one to judge. He’d only ever been to Parcae a handful of times over the years, for odd jobs that never lasted very long at all. What he remembered most about the city was that there was a shop there that made some of the best wood-fired pizza he’d ever tasted. 

It seemed as good of a reason as any to take the gig — getting paid to kill an errant Geryon _and_ eat some of the world’s best pizza was enough incentive for Dante to get off his ass. 

As it turned out, the gig ended up far more complicated than he could’ve ever anticipated. 

He had known the moment he came within visual proximity of the city that Morrison’s intel must have been off. Whatever was plaguing the city had to be far larger than just a single demonic time horse. It made all of the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, made the demon in him rise up, his blood screaming from the power he could feel emanating from the city, which stood eerily silent and still like bones bleached white beneath the hot sun. 

There was no sound, no movement.

Even the wind and the birds and the insects were silent.

Dante was the only thing that moved, his footsteps the only sound that echoed like bolts of thunder as he approached the still city. The towering gates of the city, which normally stood open in invitation, were closed. 

Beyond the walls was silence and the overwhelming presence of crushing, indomitable power. 

He really should’ve brought some back-up, but he hadn’t expected that this gig was going to be anything bigger than just a damn horse. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t a mere Geryon. It was something far more deadly; something that felt unsettlingly powerful. 

“Just what kind of doozy have you gotten me into this time, Morrison?” 

Dante sighed and studied the gate. It looked a bit too sturdy for him to easily cut through with Rebellion. Instead, he allowed his devil to rise up, red lightning coursing through him as he triggered, and then flew up over the tall walls of the city, landing neatly on a parapet. 

“What the hell?” 

The city was frozen still, locked in time.

In the street below, a small girl in a bright yellow pinafore was caught with her hand outstretched, reaching for a red balloon that hovered mid-air; a young couple stood perpetually locked in an embrace, their heads bent toward each other like in a romantic photograph; a waiter in a cafe across the way was precariously floating over a dog chasing a stray cat, the alarm on his face frozen like the droplets of water that had spilled from glasses on his serving tray to hang in the air like scintillating gems. 

Nothing breathed, not even the earth. 

It was a little like being in the grip of Quicksilver — the whole world stood still, except for Dante.

Whatever this was, it sure as hell wasn’t just a single horse. 

Dante looked towards the source of energy, which emanated from the center of the city. From his vantage point, he could see a large white tower, which appeared to have risen from the earth. It seemed charged with preternatural electricity, which sparked over the entirety of the edifice.

“Why does it _always_ have to be a goddamn tower?” he muttered under his breath as he tightened his grip around Rebellion and then launched off from the parapet.

It was eerie — flying over a city that was a graveyard of living statues, dead air beneath his wings. 

Dante soared up to the upper levels of the tower, his wings growing heavier as he approached. 

He landed on a stone outcrop jutting out near an opening. This high up, the air should have been thin, but instead, all he could feel was its dense gravity, charged with leaden weight. Even the air in his lungs felt stale, like he wasn’t quite breathing. His blood felt sluggish, his reflexes slower than he would like. 

He slashed through a crumbling crevice in the wall and let himself inside the tower, which was dark and cast in shadow, except for the occasional glow of torchlight.

Dante had expected to be confronted with a horde of demons, but the halls were empty and still, his footsteps and the blood rushing in his veins the only sound. 

It was strange to walk through enemy territory without being confronted by a hell gate, without a demon suddenly blocking his path. All that he could feel was the steady pulse of power, flowing through the walls of the tower and beneath his feet. 

He followed its pull all the way through winding narrow halls and stone stairways, ascending higher and higher, until he emerged into the cool night — which was odd, as it had been mid-morning when he entered the tower, and that had been less than a few hours ago. The sun couldn’t have set in such a short while, and yet, he found himself beneath a dark sky.

The moon closed its mouth and Dante was plunged into darkness.

Power surged from somewhere deep within the tower and the smell of brimstone and ash filled the air. A spark of silvery blue light ignited before him, and suddenly, the power that had been thrumming through the tower coalesced in an explosion, taking the form of a great horned steed covered in thick scales — the largest Geryon Dante had ever laid eyes on. 

A powerful demon sat astride the beast, a humanoid creature with the body of a Roman statue and an austere human-like face. Unlike other humanoid demons Dante had encountered in the past, this one didn’t wear thick armor. In fact, it wasn’t wearing much at all, other than what appeared to be a white toga draped over its body. The demon turned its head to look at him, and that was when Dante realized it had not one, but two faces — one facing forward, the other looking back. 

The Geryon snorted and shook its head, pawing at the ground impatiently. 

Dante grinned and swung Rebellion up to rest against his shoulder as he cocked his head and sized his quarry up. “I was expecting a dance with a little pony, but it looks like it’s gonna be a party. Had I known this was gonna be a brony meetup, I might’ve turned down Morrison from the beginning.” 

“ _Son of Sparda_ ,” the two-faced demon boomed, dual voices forming an inhuman harmonic that echoed through all of time and space. _“Hast thou come here for thy reckoning?”_

“I don’t know ‘bout any reckoning,” Dante drawled with a soft, amused snort of derision. “I was just lookin’ for the pizza joint. Looks like I made a wrong turn.” 

“ _Thou shouldst not have trespassed upon our domain_ ,” the demon declared as an enormous, muscular arm was raised, and Dante found a finger pointed at him. “ _Leave anon and mercy shall be granted.”_

“Well, that’s new,” Dante scoffed with a raised eyebrow. “I’ve seen all sorts of demons in my life — big and small; the real nasty, slimy kinds, and even ones that cut a real nice figure, but I gotta say… this is the first time any demon’s talked about _mercy._ You’re generally not the merciful type.” 

“ _Insolent cur! To bethink us mere demons!”_ said the demon. “ _We art Janus, the god of pathways and beginnings and ends; the first cry of the universe and time’s final breath. We did bear witness to the moment whence Prometheus fashion’d man from clay; and gazed whence he did steal fire from Olympus to light the way. We art time incarnate. Thou standeth before us a mere man — nay, a half-bre’d sprung from the loins of the legendary dark knight! What we art is far beyond the comprehension of thy meager existence!”_

For a moment that hung like a brief eternity, silence reigned. 

This sure as hell wasn’t the first time Dante had come across a demon that talked like he was a character straight out of a Shakespearean play; but Janus was far more powerful than Agnus ever was, and much more menacing. Dante could feel the energy emanating from the self-proclaimed god, washing over him like an inexorable wave that threatened to crush him down. 

But Dante had never been easily daunted by any being, let alone one that was deluded enough to believe itself to be a god. 

He let out a wry laugh, spreading his arms wide, and gave a generous sweep of his sword. 

He figured that it wouldn’t hurt much to play along, even if he didn’t much have the heart he once did to put a little more effort into the show. 

“You’ve got it right — I’m just a mere half-breed who struts and frets his hour upon the stage!” He strapped Rebellion to his back and gave a theatrical spin, the leather tails of his coat fluttering behind him. 

It was a shame that he didn’t have any confetti on hand to throw into the air for dramatic emphasis. 

“All the world’s a stage, and you and me — we’re mere players. We got our exits and our entrances, and each of us plays many parts. I welcome the opportunity to battle yet _another_ being of such _grand delusion_ who tells a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing…” he said, as his eyes narrowed and the levity in his voice evaporated. “Other than death.” 

Dante whipped out Ebony and Ivory and fired a charged shot straight at the demon’s dual heads. The bullets tore through the air, moving at hyperspeed, igniting twin paths that left burning, fiery trails in their wake. It should have connected instantly, but time suddenly seemed to stop, along with the bullets in their trajectory. 

It was like watching a movie on pause, the frames of the bullets, along with the fire in their paths, frozen in time, hanging midair. 

Dante didn’t waste any time trying to parse it, and instead flew into action with Rebellion as he charged in at lightning speed with a stinger, his body blurring into a furious streak of red as he attempted to close the space between them. A blast of energy rippled out of Janus without the demon even lifting a single finger, and Dante immediately tricked out of the way, skidding back across the ground.

He wasn’t hit by the blast, but even despite that, his body felt all wrong — slower, heavier, weighed down, like the breath in his lungs and the sluggish pulse of his blood. 

It felt like the molecules in the air had stopped moving, like the world they stood upon had stopped spinning. 

Whatever time-control powers Janus had was on a scale far larger and more insidious than anything Dante had ever faced before. He had known that before he even came face-to-face with the demon, but it was something else entirely to feel it shuddering in his bones.

Janus turned its head, and its other face gazed upon him with eyes as dark as pitch and as endless as space. 

“What’s wrong, huh? Just gonna sit on that lil’ pony all day and stare?” Dante taunted as he gave Rebellion a wiggle in the air. “C’mon, let’s dance.” 

_“Thou shalt rue the day thou rais’d thy hand ‘gainst a god. We curse thee to the moment of thy greatest folly and deepest regret; thou shalt suffer the wraths of time, which knoweth no mercy nor grants respite from fate.”_

Dante had thought that this was yet another mad rambling of a demon who was giving its dramatic, villainous monologue before its inevitable death. But then, Janus looked at him with its unblinking, vacuous eyes and said:

“ _We curse thee to the eternal recurrence of thy life. We curse thee to returneth to thy brother’s fall, which thou shalt suffer again. Thou shalt remain empty and incomplete, for thy brother’s blood shalt forever stain thy hands and thy brother’s soul thou canst never save.”_

Dante’s blood ran cold as his breath stopped in his lungs and all of him froze, as Vergil’s face flashed before his eyes. He didn’t know how the hell this demon could know his greatest regret; how it was able to look into him and see his past. But what he did know was the rage boiling up in his blood, an anger so furious and violent it was volcanic as it erupted. 

His devil roared to the surface and snapped its wings out, and he charged in blindly with his teeth bared in a snarl, tricking straight above the bastard with every intention of slamming Rebellion straight down upon its head and cutting it in half. 

It should have worked — he had moved at a supersonic speed that no enemy could have anticipated.

But he found himself caught like a fly in a spider’s web, unable to move a muscle, his blood paralyzed. 

Rebellion was frozen mid-air, a centimeter away from striking its target. 

Janus looked up at him with all four of its eyes. 

“ _Begone,”_ it said, and time and space folded in on itself and Dante’s world went dark.

*

**THE PRESENT, TWENTY-FOUR YEARS AGO**

Vergil stands at the edge with Yamato raised, the tip of her blade nearly brushing Dante’s throat.

The sight alone was enough to take Dante’s breath away the moment he opened his eyes and saw his brother standing there — too vivid to be a hallucination, too solid to be a dream. He can feel it in his blood, the unmistakable resonance of his brother, the steady pulse of their hearts reverberating across time, across the distance, across the twenty-four empty years that Dante had lived without him. 

Vergil is _alive_ again, living and breathing and whole; so heartbreakingly young, so achingly beautiful. His brother looks at him with eyes that recognize him, that hadn’t yet had the memory of him ripped out. Eyes that are as cold as winter, but still hold a light beyond the darkness in their depths. 

“Leave me and go, if you don’t want to be trapped in the demon world,” Vergil says, and Dante knows what is meant to happen next. He can count down the milliseconds to it as his brother takes a step back.

_We curse thee to returneth to thy brother’s fall, which thou shalt suffer again._

This moment had haunted him his entire life; he had relived it endlessly, more times than he could remember. He saw it in his dreams, and even when he was awake sometimes during his most unguarded moments. He would be sitting around minding his own shit, maybe reading a magazine or staring into nowhere, and it would slam in like a freight train out of hell: Vergil falling again. 

Dante doesn’t have time to consider what all of this might mean, or if it’s even real. He doesn’t have time to wonder if he’s really been returned to the past, or if this is just some kind of nightmare he’s being forced to relive. He knows that the moment Vergil opens his mouth next, his brother will tell him that he intends to stay. That this is their father’s home. 

He knows Vergil will take two steps back and fall; that he’ll scramble after him and reach out and his brother will slice open his left palm to stop him from following. 

He knows he won’t see his brother again, until the moment that he kills him, nine years later.

He _refuses_ to let it happen all over again.

Vergil starts to open his mouth, but before he can, Dante reaches up and grabs Yamato by the blade and slams her edge down. He tricks forward, straight onto the blade, taking Yamato right through the heart as pain sears through his entire body. He impales himself all the way down to the hilt and wraps his arms around his brother, holding on with a desperation he should’ve held on with the first time he found himself here. 

“If we fall,” Dante whispers as he curls his shaking fingers into the back of his brother’s coat, “we fall together.” 

Vergil’s eyes widen in shock as he stares down at him in disbelief. For a moment, Dante deliriously wonders if Vergil intends to pull his sword out of him and push him back; if his brother will just leave him on the top of the cliff while he falls to his own demise. Or maybe they might finally fall together, like they always were meant to do. 

“You _fool_ ,” Vergil says, his voice strained with something far too raw for Dante to sieve as he stands before his brother, slowly bleeding out. 

In hindsight, maybe he should’ve aimed lower instead of taking Yamato through the chest. 

“Why must you always have your way? Why can’t you just let me go, Dante?” Vergil sounds angry, trembling with a quiet, contained fury that Dante can feel when he staggers into him, and his brother’s strong arms wind around him for the first time in twenty-four years. 

Dante had almost forgotten what it was like to have his brother’s scent in his nose again. How it felt to have the warmth of his brother against his body. How wonderful it was, to be held in his brother’s arms.

It’s enough to break him, to shatter him completely. 

It rises up within him as swift as the river where they had cut each other open — grief deeper and blacker than the abyss just beyond; a sorrow so endless, it punches straight through his lungs and spills out of his eyes in hot, bitter tears that carve down his face as he gazes upon the other half of him he never thought he would ever see again. 

“I lost you once before, brother,” Dante manages to say through ragged, gasping breaths as he weakly clutches at his brother, fighting against the darkness threatening to engulf his world. His vision swims before him and the metallic, coppery edge of blood burns at the back of his throat. “It ain’t… ever… happenin’ again.” 

He’s suddenly gripped by choking coughs, and blood spills out of his mouth, trickling down his chin as his world spins. Vergil’s saying something, but Dante can’t hear the words, not when darkness is crushing in around him like an unyielding storm.

“Please,” he begs through a mouthful of blood, with the last ounce of strength he has left. “Take me with you.” 

Vergil looks at him with unshielded alarm as Dante’s knees go out.

It’s the last thing he sees before his world goes dark. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading the first chapter of this fic! I hope you guys like it. :D 
> 
> Dante quotes from Shakespeare's _Macbeth_ and _As You Like It_ , and does a throwback to DMC4! Janus's mention of "eternal recurrence" comes from Nietzsche's _The Gay Science_ and _Thus Spoke Zarathrustra_. It's pretty much this idea that all things will occur infinitely and eternally.
> 
> Please leave a comment/review or kudos if you enjoyed it -- comments and feedback in particular would be greatly appreciated! 
> 
> A huge thank you to [sootandshadow](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/sootandshadow) and [vorokis](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/vorokis) for beta reading and editing and helping me with ideas! <3 
> 
> A special thanks to [Auntarctica](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/auntarctica) as always, as my depiction of Vergil is unquestionably influenced by hers. 
> 
> If you liked what you read and would like to follow me on social media, you can find me on Tumblr [@subtextually](http://subtextually.tumblr.com) or on Twitter [@sub_textually](http://www.twitter.com/sub_textually).
> 
> You can also join me in the [Spardacest Discord Server](https://discord.gg/8X5nVW3) where there are 275+ of us! 
> 
> \---
> 
> "What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: _You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine._ " - Nietzsche, _The Gay Science_


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by [sootandshadow](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/sootandshadow) and [vorokis](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/vorokis)

If there is one thing Vergil knows, it’s this: his little brother is the single most infuriating, stubborn fool in the world, with a terrible penchant for ruining everything Vergil has ever cared for — himself included. 

Since they were mere boys, Dante has always found a way to destroy anything Vergil found meaningful. The casualties were numerous: his small collection of leather-bound books filled with poetry, which Dante saw fit to use as a target for sword practice on a particularly sunny afternoon, when they were scarcely seven; the rose bushes Vergil had tried to cultivate to bring a smile to their mother’s face, utterly destroyed when Vergil refused Dante's invitations to play one morning; the violin that Vergil had spent hours of meticulous practice mastering, meeting a gruesome end for no reason other than his refusal to share it with his brother.

Dante never could seem to accept that Vergil might care for something that was not shared with him; that he might pay attention to an object of study that did not require Dante’s participation or presence; that Vergil might give part of himself or his heart to anything that wasn’t Dante. 

It should have come as no surprise that Dante would once again find a way to destroy years of work, tearing apart Vergil’s carefully cultivated plan root and stem, to reclaim their birthright and their father’s power; that little brother would do everything he could to thwart Vergil’s goal of becoming strong enough to vanquish the demon responsible for killing their mother and condemning Dante and Vergil to believe each other dead for nearly ten years. That Dante would even do something so foolish as piercing his own heart with Yamato, all because he has always refused to understand the fundamental truth: until Mundus is killed, and Vergil rules the underworld, there will always remain a threat to them both.

Vergil had begun his quest as the corporeal hand of justice for his family; but the moment he beheld his little brother once more with his own eyes, and felt the life-affirming resonance in their blood, he knew that he would have to sacrifice everything in the name of protecting that which he failed to protect all those years ago, when the sky burned red and Vergil lost everything he’d ever loved, and the other half of his soul. 

He would never allow Mundus to remain a threat to his little brother, even if it meant throwing everything away — Dante’s love for him, and the transcendent happiness they eventually found in each other’s arms. 

And yet, Dante was so determined to stop him at every turn, chasing him to the top of the Temen-ni-gru, and down into the bowels of the earth. Refusing to leave, even as the tower began to crumble. Running himself through instead of allowing Vergil to save him from his own foolish recklessness. 

Vergil does not know how Dante could have anticipated what he had planned to do; how his little brother could have known that he was but two steps away from a fall which would have ensured that Dante would return to the human world which his brother so loved. And yet, in a fit of panic and despair, he had willingly fallen on Vergil’s sword and clutched him with a hopeless desperation Vergil had never felt from him before. 

He had been so careless in his pursuit that he did not think of the danger he was bringing to himself by taking Yamato straight through the heart.

Even in their most bitter, bloody confrontations, Vergil never dared to risk piercing Dante’s heart with his own sword. Rebellion had been a careful gamble; it was Dante’s weapon, and filled with his energy. It was a risk Vergil felt confident in taking, to awaken his brother’s demon, the way Yamato had awakened his. 

But Yamato, which is imbued with his own energy, and powerful enough to cut through space, has never been a weapon Vergil would ever risk running through Dante’s heart intentionally. 

While he has penetrated his brother countless times with his beloved weapon, Vergil was always careful to protect his brother’s heart.

Dante could heal from such a wound, could recover without much fuss. 

But Vergil does not know how Dante would recover from taking a weapon that is not imbued with his own energy, and was forged by their father, through the heart. The way his little brother had collapsed in his arms, the weakness Vergil can feel in his blood, is as alarming as his brother’s tears and the waves of grief that had poured from him like a torrential flood. 

Vergil grasps his brother carefully in his arms and lowers them both down to the ground. 

“Dante,” he says, as he gives his little brother a shake, and then cups Dante’s face, tilting it up. 

Dante does not stir. His eyes are closed and his mouth parted softly, his lips and teeth stained red with blood. Vergil looks down at Yamato, which is buried deep in his brother’s chest, and presses his lips together into a tight line. He knows that if he pulls Yamato out, Dante might exsanguinate in his arms. But if the sword is left in place, his little brother will not be able to heal, and will never regain consciousness.

Vergil takes a bracing breath, and then lies Dante down on his back. He removes his coat, carefully arranging it around the blade, then grasps Yamato by her hilt, and with a quick jerk, he pulls her out from his brother’s body. The coat immediately is saturated with Dante’s blood, and Vergil watches in quiet alarm as Dante abruptly convulses and chokes on a mouthful of dark blood.

The sight and sound of it is like a fist around the lungs. Vergil can scarcely draw in a breath. 

“ _Dante,_ ” Vergil says again as he presses his coat tighter against the wound on Dante’s chest and turns his brother’s head slightly to allow the blood to flow out. His brother coughs a gasping, wet breath as the blood trickles from his mouth, and then settles, his breathing evening out once more. 

To Vergil’s relief, it seems as though Dante’s healing factor must have kicked in, as the blood flow from the wound appears to be slowing. 

Around them, the tower crumbles ominously, boulders and rocks falling from the sky. 

They do not have much time. 

It does not appear like Dante will wake anytime soon. If Vergil does not intervene, he is certain of one thing: his little brother will die.

“All right, little brother,” Vergil finally says after a short, excruciating moment, as the earth groans around them and the cliff beneath them begins to shake. “You win this time.” 

He gathers up Dante in his arms and rises. 

While Vergil is willing to sacrifice his brother’s love, he is not willing to sacrifice his life — after all, this precious life is what he had given up everything to keep safe. 

He refuses to let his brother perish; if he must raise Temen-ni-gru a second time, if he must find another way back to the underworld, so be it; even if it takes him another ten years. 

*

The sky is quiet with mourning by the time they emerge from the gloomy depths of Temen-ni-gru to a world that is solemn and wet in the aftermath of the storm. 

Behind them, the tower groans and creaks as it crumbles and returns to the earth from which it had risen. It would surely be quite the spectacle, but Vergil only has eyes for the precious cargo in his arms, whom he had carried from the edge of hell back into the world of the living. 

The cold fury within him can wait for release.

First, Vergil must find somewhere safe for him to hold vigil over Dante as his little brother heals. He will deal with the consequences of Dante’s foolishness after he is certain his brother had not somehow caused irreparable damage to himself.

It is not the click of a finger against a trigger, or the slight scatter of rocks that alerts him to the human. 

Rather, it is her restless energy, which radiates from her body like a beacon, stirring his demonic blood and stopping him mid-step.

Vergil calmly looks at the woman standing before him with a gun pointed in his direction — Arkham’s daughter.

The woman, whom the clown had called _Mary_ , stares at Dante with an expression on her face that seems almost aghast, before it sharpens with anger. Her eyes whip up to meet his, hard and glittering with unchecked emotion, which he would not have expected her to have for his brother. 

“You _monster.”_ She spits out the words like venom and tightens her grip around the gun. “You killed your own _brother?”_

“He is merely unconscious,” Vergil explains, and watches as confusion washes over the woman’s face. “Not that it is any of your concern.” 

He takes a step forward, which causes the woman to suddenly cock her gun, aiming directly at him. Vergil pauses again, the slightest frown creasing between his brows. He does not have much patience or mercy for humans, and certainly not one who is, at present, aiming a weapon at him while he’s carrying his little brother in his arms.

“What are you going to do with him?” She narrows her eyes as she nods at Dante. 

“I will do with him what I please,” Vergil says. “He is my brother.” 

“Just because he’s your brother doesn’t mean you get to make decisions for him. Put him down.”

Vergil narrows his eyes and instinctively tightens his hold on Dante. “Ah, I suppose you believe that _you_ have the authority to make decisions for him? What exactly is the nature of your relationship with my brother, Mary?” 

“Don’t _ever_ call me that,” the woman spits out, her eyes flashing angrily. “My name is _Lady._ And I never said I had the right to make any decisions for him, but at least I sure as hell wouldn’t be taking him somewhere he didn’t agree to!” 

Dante groans softly in his arms and Vergil’s eyes snap down momentarily. His brother’s skin is clammy and pale, and he’s shivering slightly from the blood loss from which he has not yet recovered. 

“My brother is injured. You’re wasting my time,” Vergil declares, and resumes walking, ignoring the fact that Lady has a gun still trained on him. “If you insist on shooting, then do so, or get out of the way. ” 

Lady sets her jaw in a tight line and her arm shakes as Vergil passes by. 

“If you hurt him, I’ll never forgive you,” she grinds out between her teeth from somewhere behind him. 

_If I truly hurt him, I would never forgive myself,_ Vergil thinks as he walks away. 

He doesn’t look back. 

*

The walk back to the room Vergil had rented is far too silent and still.

Judging from the disarray, the city must have been emptied in a frenzied panic. Doors on buildings hang ajar, as though the inhabitants within had just stepped out to take the air and intended to return shortly. Broken flower pots and street vendor wares lie scattered along the side of the road. Suitcases sit abandoned, burst open in the middle of the street. A doll that must have been dropped by a little girl lies face-up under the gloomy sky. 

Vergil does not have to look behind him to know that the woman has followed them. He can feel her presence like an incessant buzz just under the surface of his skin. He allows it, as he does not have time to waste on her, and she otherwise appears to be harmless. 

He stops before the quaint bed and breakfast where he had been staying. The establishment was run by a kindly old woman and her husband, who enjoyed taking his afternoon tea in the rose garden in the courtyard. They owned a small dog, which always met guests at the door, and was surprisingly well-behaved and quiet.

No dog greets them now as they enter into the building, which is eerily quiet, save for the ticking of a large clock in the foyer. 

Vergil ascends the stairs with Dante and brings him to his room, which appears to have been untouched in his absence. There is a neatly made bed centered in the room, which Vergil carries his brother to and gently lays him down upon. He sets aside the small pile of weapons that Dante had cradled while in his arms — carefully laying down Rebellion next to Yamato and Force Edge.

Dante is still trembling, and a sheen of cold sweat has formed on his skin. Vergil frowns at the sight, and fetches a hot, damp towel from the ensuite bathroom, which he uses to clean the blood off his brother’s chest. As he’d suspected, the wound had closed, leaving only a faint pink depression where the skin is still endeavoring to heal.

He undresses his brother, stripping him of his soiled clothing and guns and amulet, tucks him under the warm blanket and sheets, and then pulls up a chair to his side. 

Vergil sighs as he carefully wipes the blood off his little brother’s face. 

Dante had looked so broken earlier, so raw. The brash veneer of insouciance which he always wore like armor had shattered like glass, leaving behind a wounded little brother Vergil could scarcely recognize. Dante had looked up at him through a sea of tears, in desperation and grief.

The feeling of it was brutal — a strike to the chest so intense, it had taken Vergil’s breath with it.

His brother had seen fit to humble himself before him and beg — something Dante never does; has never done, certainly not in such a way. Dante is always too stubborn, too obstinate, to know how to properly beg without Vergil grinding him down in their most intimate moments.

But at that moment, there was no question of his sincerity. No doubt that he really was willing to leave behind everything if it meant that he wouldn’t lose his brother.

Vergil could feel it inside of him — how desperately Dante wanted to hold onto him, when just seconds before, all he could sense from his brother was a steady stream of resentment and the familiar heat of his anger. 

Was it because Dante could not bear the thought of leaving him? Or was it because Vergil had unknowingly intimated his intention to fall, through their twin bond? 

Vergil sets aside the towel, and then reaches forward to gently smooth back his brother’s hair. 

There will be time later for Dante to face the consequences of his foolish actions.

Right now, all Vergil wants is to see his little brother open his eyes.

*

When he was young, Dante used to think that the world made sense.

He had a mother who loved and doted on him, and a brother who was his entire world. He would wake up in the morning, bright-eyed and ready to conquer the day, and scamper off through the house until he found Vergil, reading a book or playing the violin or otherwise not paying very much attention to him at all. 

He would poke and prod and whine until his brother gave him the attention he always craved, settling the restless energy that came with the ever-present desire to feel closer to his brother in some way. He always wanted his brother’s eyes locked upon him, instead of drifting off in some book; he always needed assurance that he meant as much to Vergil as Vergil did to him, that there was nothing more important to his brother in this world than him. That his brother loved him as much as he was loved in return; that he needed him as much as Dante always needed Vergil. 

He understood his place in the world because he only had half a soul, and it was only when he was with Vergil that he felt whole. 

He never imagined that the day would come when he would no longer know his place in the world; that he would be without the other half of his soul and a mother who once loved them both; that he would drift through the next ten years alone, believing that he would never again know what it was like to be whole. 

But life had a pretty fucked up sense of humor.

It gave him back his brother, and his place in the world.

It let him know his brother in all the ways that were sinful and depraved, and shame had cut him deep for it. From the moment he laid his eyes on his brother again in the fraught aftermath of their reunion, he was gripped with a hunger that swept through him like fever. It crept underneath his skin and into his dreams, which were filled with a brother so beautiful, he could hardly believe that Vergil was real. He would lie in bed at night alone, eaten up by his twisted fantasies of his brother, near mad with need that left him hard and aching.

It was sick and fucked up, how badly he wanted his brother, how desperately he craved closeness, craved the wholeness that he knew he would find in Vergil’s arms. 

Just being close enough to feel Vergil’s eyes on him once more was intoxicating. Dante could barely imagine what it would be like to have some part of Vergil within him, if just his brother’s eyes upon him felt so electric.

The fantasy of it was as monstrous as how he felt for having it, for daring to dream of his brother in a way that was so unnatural. He would try his best to resist the urge, to deny what his entire body yearned, but eventually the need grew to be too much, and he would find himself rutting into his own hand, overcome by thoughts of his brother. 

After, he would lie in his own filth, quietly hating himself and ashamed of his inability to stop wanting his brother in all the ways that were blasphemous to the doctrine of fraternal love.

But then came the night Vergil had come to him, drawn by the magnetism of their shared blood, and by the same desires that had haunted Dante for so many sleepless nights. 

We can’t do this, Dante had insisted, even as he shuddered beneath his brother’s palms as Vergil explored him with hands that left burning trails over Dante’s skin everywhere he touched. 

Why not? Vergil had asked as he pressed his wicked mouth against Dante’s throat, as they rutted against one another, mostly clothed. 

It’s wrong, Dante had said, even though it certainly didn’t feel as wrong as what his mind tried to tell him; if anything, he had never felt anything so right in his life before. There was always something missing, some inexplicable part of him that always seemed to defy meaning. And yet, with Vergil, he felt like he could understand it — that strange, missing part of him which was always waiting to be filled. 

All along, he had wanted to be closer to Vergil; even as a child, when he crept into his brother’s bed when nightmares scared him awake or storms swept through the night sky, he never felt like he could get close enough. 

Is that what you really think, Dante? Vergil had whispered into his ear, his voice sinuous and soft and menacing, and Dante wanted so badly to say no, to tell him that it wasn’t true, that he didn’t really think it was wrong, even when he knew it was. He opened his mouth to say something, but found it filled with his brother’s tongue, and Dante forgot that he wasn’t supposed to want him; that what they were doing wasn’t natural. 

He fell deeper that night than he’d ever fallen before, and in the end with Vergil deep inside of him, he finally understood what he had been missing all along. 

Life, in all of its strangeness, had made him whole again for a beautiful, shining moment, and ignited a fire in his blood that would never stop burning. It made him fall in love with his brother when he fell into his arms, and for a little while, the world made sense once more. It gave him everything he ever wanted and everything he never knew he desired. 

And then it took it all away when Vergil fell. 

In his dreams after, Vergil never would stop falling. It was all Dante ever saw whenever he closed his eyes — his brother falling away from him into an endless abyss. He would see himself standing there, reaching for a brother he would never hold again, watching his entire world fall further and further away until Vergil was swallowed by the darkness, falling forever. 

Dante would close his eyes and Vergil would fall, and in the end, he stopped sleeping entirely in the bed where they had once consummated their love.

He slept in snatches everywhere else — in his chair behind his desk, standing up while he waited in line to pick up pizza, or sometimes, on the couch. Little naps too uncomfortable and too short and dreamless to really be called sleep at all. 

For twenty-four years he did his best to not sleep when he could, but he was only half-demon, and he ultimately always succumbed to the part of him that was human. When sleep came, so did the fall. And if it wasn’t Vergil falling, then it was Vergil dying, disintegrating into the air before Dante’s eyes. Sometimes, it was their mother on that terrible, bloody night when the sky burned and their world with it. But mostly, Vergil fell.

He never did fall with him in those dreams, and he never could stop him, either. 

And so it is strange, that after twenty-four years of watching his brother fall, Dante has finally succeeded in stopping him. 

* 

For the first time since the fall, Dante doesn’t want to wake up. Doesn’t want to open his eyes to the bleak light of day, knowing that he’ll have to face the reality of a world without his brother. 

If he lets himself sleep longer, allows the dream to continue, maybe he can remain with a brother who doesn’t fall; maybe they can walk away from the edge of the cliff and have the life together Dante had always dreamt of when they were young. 

But Dante can’t live forever in a dream, no matter how much he wishes he could. 

He can’t sleep forever, either — eventually, reality will catch up to him.

He wakes slowly, coming back to the world in pieces. 

He rediscovers his body, and is confused by the heaviness in his limbs, and by the ache in his chest that feels like he’d had a fist put through it. He doesn’t remember getting into a fight before falling asleep wherever he’d passed out the night before, and he’s momentarily disoriented as he stirs slowly, peeling open his eyes and squinting as he’s assaulted immediately by the morning light.

It’s with a start that Dante realizes he doesn’t recognize the ceiling above him, and he isn’t in his chair or on the couch. 

Instead, he’s in a soft bed. 

What the actual fuck.

Dante blinks blearily at the too-bright, sleep-blurred world around him, groaning softly as he lifts up a fist and rubs at his eyes, to try and clear the confusion out of them. And it’s at that very moment, just before his vision clears, that his entire body gives a hard, resonant pulse that locks up every muscle in his body and every atom of himself. 

“ _Dante._ ”

Oh god.

_Oh god._

He must still be dreaming. He has to be. 

Dante’s breath seizes in his chest and his heart lurches beneath his ribs as his blood comes alive, sweeping through him with a roar he hasn’t felt in twenty-four years. It rips through him in a torrential flood, every part of him calling to his other half, pulling him like the tide to the shore. 

It’s a gravity more ancient than time, more powerful than the pull of the sun to the earth.

This is his brother’s blood.

This is how it feels to be in his presence. 

“Dante?” 

Slowly, Dante brings his fist down from his eyes, his gaze moving carefully down from the ceiling to lock on a face he never thought he’d see again in daylight. He’d seen this face falling away from him in the dark for far too long; he’d seen this face pale and shot through with corruption, with eyes that looked at him but didn’t recognize him at all. 

But here he is again, young and beautiful, lit up golden by the sun spilling through the open window beside him. Vergil gazes down with unguarded worry in his pale blue eyes and the tiniest frown stitched between his brows. His lips are pink and parted slightly, his skin as pale as alabaster and as smooth as the surface of a pearl. 

Dante stares in disbelief at this impossible vision, waiting for the mirage of his brother to surely fade. Instead, Vergil’s frown deepens as he looks over Dante, and then he reaches out, perhaps to reassure him with a touch, or to brush back his hair — a tender gesture he’d done countless times in their youth, which Dante still remembers, even when the feeling of it had faded like an old photograph. 

Vergil’s hand suddenly freezes before it reaches him as he looks at Dante with alarm, and then Dante finds his face gently grasped by his brother, and the tender shock of it is so intense that it’s painful. 

This is the way his brother had always touched him when he was concerned; holding him so carefully, as though Vergil was afraid he might somehow break him.

“Dante, are you in pain? Talk to me, brother.” 

He abruptly realizes the reason for Vergil’s alarm — there’s a flood in his eyes and it’s spilled over, streaking down his cheeks in hot, bitter tears. He never did cry openly before his brother after they were reunited. He was always too proud, too stubborn, to humble himself enough to shed tears. 

Dante doesn’t know how any of this is possible; how his brother can be alive, or how this is real. 

He reaches out with shaking fingers for Vergil’s face, almost certain that the moment he makes contact, his fingers will go right through him.

Instead, they land on soft, firm skin, and Dante stares up in wonder at Vergil as he cups his brother’s face, a twenty-four year old memory slamming through him as vividly as the feeling of his brother’s skin beneath his hand. 

“You’re real,” Dante finally says, his voice coming out all wrong — too young, too ragged with grief, too confused. “Oh god, you’re real,” he gasps as he surges up in bed as Vergil’s hands fall away from him in confusion. He wildly clutches Vergil’s face with both hands, staring at him in wonder through a sea of tears. 

“Yes, Dante,” says Vergil slowly, as though it’s a foregone conclusion.

“You’re alive,” Dante continues, and this time a sob punctuates the statement, his entire body wracked with relief so visceral, it’s nearly agonizing. “You’re really here.” 

“Did you really think I would leave you to die, little brother?” Vergil raises an eyebrow slightly. 

“You didn’t fall. You didn’t—” Dante’s breath hitches with another sob, as the storm brewing inside of him suddenly unleashes its full force. It tears through him without any warning — twenty-four years of grief and mourning, twenty-four years of loss. Twenty-four years of trying to keep his brother’s memory alive; of wishing for death that simply would not come; of waiting for the moment when he would finally be reunited with his brother again in the afterlife. 

Dante falls into Vergil’s arms, sobbing so violently, he can’t even get in a breath. 

This is his brother’s body against his own. This is his brother’s arms wrapped around him once more. This is his brother’s breath in his hair. This is his brother’s heart beating beneath his skin. 

This is his brother, alive again.

“How—” 

It suddenly all comes back to him — the two-faced demon, the city frozen in time. The curse that should have made him relive Vergil’s fall again. 

Janus sure as hell hadn’t meant for him to be able to stop the fall. But then, the demon probably hadn’t anticipated that Dante would be willing to fall with him. That he would go as far as running himself through with Yamato.

For the first time in twenty-four years, the nightmare of the past hadn’t repeated itself. 

For the first time in twenty-four years, Vergil didn’t fall. 

He’s alive, he’s here, and Dante is never going to let him go. 

[ ](http://www.twitter.com/heibiindi)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A HUGE thank you to [@heIbIindi](http://www.twitter.com/heibindii) for the gorgeous artwork. <3 
> 
> \---
> 
> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Please leave a comment/review or kudos if you enjoyed it -- comments and feedback in particular would be greatly appreciated! 
> 
> A huge thank you to [sootandshadow](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/sootandshadow) and [vorokis](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/vorokis) for beta reading and editing and helping me with ideas! <3 
> 
> A special thanks to [Auntarctica](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/auntarctica) as always, as my depiction of Vergil is unquestionably influenced by hers. 
> 
> If you liked what you read and would like to follow me on social media, you can find me on Tumblr [@subtextually](http://subtextually.tumblr.com) or on Twitter [@sub_textually](http://www.twitter.com/sub_textually).
> 
> You can also join me in the [Spardacest Discord Server](https://discord.gg/8X5nVW3) where there are 285+ of us!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Trigger Warning:** Some descriptions of suicidal ideation are in this chapter. 
> 
> Beta'd by [sootandshadow](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/sootandshadow) and [vorokis](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/vorokis)

They were seven years old when their father died. 

The news was brought by two young men who removed their hats and looked down upon Vergil when he answered the door. They were well-groomed and finely dressed, and had the look of men who attended the lavish banquets and dinners that their parents held. Their father would often take such men into the sitting room, to discuss matters in low voices behind closed doors. 

It was after one such meeting that their father had emerged into the hall, his face grim and his eyes hardened like glacial ice. He took Vergil aside after the men had left and bent down on one knee to look him in the eye.

“Vergil, I must depart on a trip soon, to attend to a matter. In my absence, I entrust you to look after your mother and brother,” his father had said, as he placed a hand upon Vergil’s shoulder. 

“Yes, Father,” Vergil had said without any hesitation. He was, after all, his father’s firstborn son, and took his duty quite seriously, even at seven years old. “How long do you expect to be gone?” 

For the first time in his young life, Vergil saw uncertainty in his father’s eyes. 

“I do not know,” Sparda had said with a faint smile. “It may take some time to settle the matter.” His father had looked at him with an expression he did not fully understand at the time, but which he later understood to be regret. “Be strong, my son,” Sparda said quietly. “I leave the protection of our family to you.” 

Vergil found himself swept up in his father’s all-encompassing embrace. Had he known how soon he would have had to honor his father’s request, he never would have let him go. 

Less than a month later, he stood in the doorway of their home, cautiously looking up at two strange men. Their mother had invited them inside and bid him to take Dante to play. 

“You have news of my husband?” she had asked, as Vergil reluctantly led Dante away by the hand. But what he heard next stopped him in his tracks. 

“My lady, I am so very sorry,” one of the men had said mournfully. “There was… a fierce battle. Lord Sparda fought valiantly, but he was… overcome.” 

“Overcome,” Eva repeated, as if she could not comprehend the meaning of the word.

“Lord Sparda… perished. He asked us to bring this home to you.” The man reached into his pocket and removed an object wrapped in black silk, which he handed to their mother, who unwrapped it slowly with a trembling hand. 

The silk fell away to reveal a familiar red amulet. 

Eva made a strangled, bereft sound, and clamped a hand over her mouth, staring down at the amulet in shock. Before Vergil could process the terrible impossibility of the truth, Dante tore out of his grip like a wild animal and descended upon the man with a fury no seven year old should have. 

“You’re lying! Take it back! _Take it back!”_

His little brother was kicking and punching and fighting with all of his might, as though if he fought hard enough, he could punch the words back into the messenger’s mouth. Perhaps he believed he could force the words to be swallowed, and the horror of the truth along with it.

Their father was dead, and all they had left of him was their mother’s amulet and their swords.

“Dante!” Eva cried out, as she began to move towards her youngest son. 

Vergil could feel the overwhelming surge of his brother’s grief and wild panic like a tidal wave. It subsumed everything in its path without mercy, sweeping away the quiet well of darkness that had threatened to consume him in the aftermath of the revelation. Vergil could not allow himself to succumb; his father had entrusted the protection of their family to him. 

Only he had the power to stand tall for his family now. 

He moved quickly before their mother could reach the fight, prying Dante off the object of his fury, who was doing his best to defend himself against a feral demon of a child. “Dante! Calm yourself, brother!” 

“Lemme go!”Dante snarled as he began to sob, his arms and legs flailing as Vergil held his little brother fast against him. “ _Lemme go!”_

 _“Dante!_ That’s enough! _”_ Vergil tightened his arms around his brother, refusing to let go even as Dante smashed his fists down against Vergil’s wrists and stomped on his foot in an attempt to escape. Determined to endure his brother's grief until Dante tired himself out, Vergil gritted this teeth against the onslaught until finally, Dante's small body sagged against him, trembling. When he turned Dante around in his arms to hold him properly, his little brother immediately buried his hot, wet face in the curve of Vergil’s neck and wailed inconsolably. 

“Thank you for bringing this back to me,” Eva said to the messengers, her eyes glittering with tears as she clutched the amulet to her chest. She wiped hastily at her eyes, and then gestured towards the door. “Please, if you will, my children need me.” 

*

Dante had cried himself to sleep that night, wrapped up in Vergil’s arms after their mother had put them to bed. 

His little brother’s grief was an all-consuming black storm that had threatened to engulf them both. Vergil had never felt anything like it before, but then, they had never known loss so deep, nor had they ever imagined a world without their father. 

The grief that pours out of Dante now is even more devastating than it was back then. 

It is so unexpected and profound that Vergil is momentarily staggered by the volatility of the emotion he can feel through their twin bond. His brother sobs against his chest, his entire body shaking with the force of his sorrow, which tears through them both with a brutality that Vergil cannot hope to guard against. 

“Dante…” he murmurs softly, as he closes his eyes and clutches his brother’s head against him, holding him close, stroking his fingers soothingly through his brother’s pale hair. Dante is crying so violently, he is unable to form words, his breath hitching around incoherent syllables that he soon gives up on as he surrenders to the anguish that strikes them both. 

The depth of his grief is unfathomable; a bottomless abyss that yawns wide between them.

Vergil is shaken by its bewildering intensity. There is no reason for Dante to be so distraught. It is not as though Vergil had been able to go through with his plan, even though victory had been but mere inches away — Dante had seen to that. If anything, his little brother should be crowing with smug satisfaction that Vergil had chosen to cast aside years of planning in order to save his life. 

But Dante does not seem triumphant. He feels broken, shattered beyond recognition. 

This is certainly not the response Vergil would have expected from his brash little brother, but then, he also hadn’t expected the lengths Dante would have gone to stop him, without any consideration for his own self-preservation. 

“What were you thinking?” Vergil finally asks into the quiet of the room long after Dante’s tears have died down. They had been holding each other on the bed for some time in silence, with Dante half-collapsed against him, his face tucked beneath Vergil’s chin. “You could have died.”

Dante tenses in Vergil’s arms, his breath shuddering out of him. 

Vergil waits for the witty comeback with which his brother surely would strike back, now that his tears have subsided. But all that greets him is a new wave of crippling grief and his brother’s rocky silence, followed by the bitter heat of fresh tears against his neck. 

Vergil is slightly taken back by this development. He has never known his brother to be so fragile. Since he was a child, Dante has always lashed out with anger or irreverence, holding it between them as a shield. Even moments before he had run himself through with Yamato, Dante had bristled with righteous indignation, his eyes hard and guarded. 

Vergil is well-acquainted with his brother’s choice of defensive weaponry; but he is ill prepared for Dante’s unexpected vulnerability. It is so unlike his little brother to be so defenseless before him, as though Dante has forgotten himself completely. Yet, despite his best attempts to remain unmoved, Vergil finds himself softening towards his little brother as Dante shakes with silent sobs in his arms. 

Vergil turns his face into his brother’s soft hair and closes his eyes once more, grimly weathering the storm that is his brother’s breakdown. 

It takes some time, but eventually Dante calms down, his breathing evening out. Vergil knows better than to breach the silence again between them so soon. Dante will speak when he is ready. Right now, he seems intent on clutching him desperately with his face pressed against Vergil’s chest, taking comfort in the steady resonance of their blood. 

Vergil allows this, indulging his little brother one last time as he pets his fingers through Dante’s hair. 

“I had to stop you,” Dante finally says, his words muffled. “I couldn’t lose you again.” 

Vergil sighs, and gently pulls away slowly, framing Dante’s shoulders with his hands to prevent his little brother from clinging. “Dante, it won’t be forever,” he reassures. “I have explained this to you countless times already. I must settle the matter.” 

Dante’s face fills with raw panic, his eyes glinting wildly. “You’re not still thinking ‘bout going back, are ya?” 

“You know I must.” 

The breath his little brother takes is wounded, a ragged gasp that Vergil viscerally feels within him. “You _can’t._ ” 

“Dante—” 

“You won’t be able to stop Mundus by yourself.” 

“You don’t know that.”

“Vergil,” Dante says as he reaches for him. His brother’s hands clutch his face, framing it. There is a look in his wide eyes which is as much desperation as it is terror. It is such a foreign look for his indomitable little brother that Vergil is momentarily stunned, until Dante says, “You aren’t strong enough to defeat him on your own. Not as you are now.” 

The words rankle and twist in his gut. Vergil’s eyes narrow as he reaches up and removes his brother’s hands from his face, withdrawing. The coldness within him that had thawed in the wake of Dante’s tears viciously returns. His eyes ice over as he closes himself up as neatly as a lake in winter. 

He does not know what is worse — that Dante does not believe him to be powerful enough to defeat Mundus, or that his brother does not have faith that he will do what is best for them both, no matter the cost. 

“You never fail to disappoint, Dante,” Vergil says calmly, as he rises from the bed and adjusts his clothing, before reaching for Yamato. His brother’s eyes flash with hurt that Vergil can feel surging within him as he cuts Dante down with a truth far more brutal than any Judgement Cut: “If there is anything I know more intimately, it is your doubt, and your lack of faith in the one whom you claim to love most.”

“No amount of faith is gonna bring you back, Vergil!” 

“Why must you always insist on my failure, brother? Why must you always fight to stop me from claiming my birthright?”

“Because you’re going to _die!”_ Dante shouts with a stunning blast of grief so intense and visceral, that it shakes Vergil all the way down to the bones. His brother’s anguish is so out of place that Vergil is momentarily at a loss for words as he tries to comprehend the reason behind it — along with Dante’s unwavering conviction. 

Dante is trembling now, his eyes dark and hollowed out as he looks at him. “You’re going to die,” he says again, a little more softly this time, his breath hitching in the back of his throat as he swallows hard. “Not immediately,” he continues far too quietly, his eyes drifting off Vergil’s face, down to the blanket over his lap. “When you fight Mundus, you won’t be able to beat him. He’s gonna capture you, and then he’s gonna corrupt you. Eventually, you’ll forget everything about yourself.” A foreign, bitter smile finds its way onto Dante’s face. “Even me.” 

“Dante,” Vergil says very slowly, as unwanted, cold emotion slides between his ribs. “How could you possibly know this?” 

He watches as his brother stares down at the blanket beneath him, twisting it between his hands. His face crumbles, all the lines of his body falling into defeated resignation as renewed tears streak down from his eyes. This is not the same little brother who had stubbornly chased him to the ends of the earth; this is a little brother Vergil suddenly does not recognize. 

“Because I killed you, Vergil,” Dante whispers, his voice cracking with emotion as Vergil stares at his brother in disbelief. “ _I killed you_ ,” he rasps out again, his shoulders hunching over as he wraps his arms around himself. He grasps his own elbows as he silently sobs — as though he might shake apart if he does not hold himself together. 

Vergil sits down quite hard, setting Yamato back down. He stares at Dante without really seeing him, as he considers the impossibility of his words. His brother clearly believes that he had indeed killed him; his grief is so incomprehensible, the abyss of it is so deep that Vergil does not doubt it to be true to Dante. 

The intensity of his brother’s emotions suddenly makes startling sense. 

You’re alive, Dante had said, clutching him with a desperation Vergil had never before felt. 

And yet, Vergil sits here unscathed and breathing. Perhaps being stabbed through the heart with the Yamato gave Dante terrible dreams, and upon waking, he is now having trouble grasping reality.

“Dante,” he says a little more softly. “You didn’t kill me. How could I be here with you, if what you are saying is true? It must have been a bad dream.” 

Dante shakes his head, sniffling wetly. “It wasn’t a dream, brother,” he says a little too brokenly, looking up at him again.

What he says next makes Vergil’s blood run cold. 

“It was twenty-four years. I lived it.” 

*

It couldn’t really be called a life at all — the twenty-four years Dante had lived with only half a soul.

There had been a time when he was once alive, when he was wrapped up in his brother’s arms; when he was filled with something greater than even the universe, more powerful than gravity, more sacred and divine than anything Dante could have ever imagined. 

There was meaning in the wholeness, in what they were when they were together.

Without Vergil, Dante no longer had a purpose or a reason to walk the earth. 

He simply existed, drifting through the sea called life without any direction, hoping that one day he might find an enemy strong enough to send him to the afterlife. One day, he told himself, he would be able to hold Vergil again, or whatever it was his soul had become. 

But Dante never could find a demon who was strong enough to take him down. Not even Mundus was powerful enough.

It wasn’t for lack of trying, either. For some time, he went running towards it — chasing after death with the same grim determination as he had chased after his brother. However, he’d discovered long ago that he wasn’t easy to kill, even when he was the one who was trying to end himself. Not even a five-year stint in the underworld helped him meet his end. 

Dying simply wouldn’t take. 

Life seemed determined to keep him rooted to this earth, and perhaps that was his punishment for letting Vergil fall. For not chasing him to hell. For killing him, in the end, instead of finding some other way. 

“I can’t let the past happen all over again,” Dante says. 

He knows how crazy he must sound. Vergil probably thinks he’s lost his everlasting shit. After all, it’s not like time travel was ever a possibility before this very moment. If Dante were in Vergil’s position, he probably wouldn’t be able to believe it, either. 

“Look, I know this sounds like a crock of horseshit, but I ain’t lyin’, Vergil,” he says, looking up at his brother as he wipes at his wet eyes. “Right before I… woke up in this time, or whatever, I was fightin’ this time demon. He said some shit about sending me back in time. To the moment of my greatest regret.” It’s hard, saying it out loud. Having to speak a truth he has held buried within the mausoleum of his heart for so long. “The next thing I knew, I was suddenly standing on that damn cliff again.” 

Dante brushes away hot tears that just won’t stop. It’s infuriating, his sudden inability to control himself, how intense everything feels. He can’t seem to hold back the tide that keeps pouring out of him, no matter how hard he tries to swallow it down. 

Shit. He’d forgotten how much it sucks to be nineteen years old. 

His brother is quiet, staring at him with an expression that’s completely unreadable. 

“I lived without you for twenty-four years,” he says quietly. “I ain’t ever gonna do it again, and I don’t really care if you even believe me. If you’re that determined to not listen to reason and still wanna take on Mundus, you better take me with you. We can die trying for all I care, but I ain’t letting ya leave me behind again. I sure as hell don’t have it in me to kill you again.” 

Silence stretches between them.

Vergil studies Dante with his brows stitched together, his jaw tense. 

As unbelievable as the story might be, Vergil cannot deny the sincerity that he hears in his brother’s words. It is so incredibly outrageous that Vergil knows Dante could not have easily come up with it on his own, nor does Vergil believe that Dante would lie to him about something quite like this. His brother might look him in the eye and tell him that he doesn’t like him one bit, while wielding love like it’s his sword, but he certainly would never dare to lie about living without Vergil for twenty-four years. 

Even if Vergil might have had difficulty accepting Dante’s words, when he looks at his brother again, he sees him clearly for the first time since Dante had fallen on his sword.

This is not the same little brother Vergil remembers.

He is not the same little brother who had declared that his soul was telling him to stop Vergil, no matter the cost. That particular little brother had a fire burning in his eyes, a light that shone within him which was brighter than the sun. But the brother who sits beside him now looks at Vergil with eyes that had all the light burned out. 

All that is left of his fire is soot and ash, and it pains Vergil to look at him and realize that he must have been the cause of it. 

Dante looks away when Vergil’s gaze lingers a little too long. His insolent little brother had never been so skittish in the past, nor had he ever backed down from a challenge — certainly not like this. He also never spoke the way he did just now — like his words were as worn down as the rest of him. 

Vergil comes to the impossible conclusion that Dante must be telling the truth.

He does not know how any time demon could have enough power to send Dante’s future consciousness back in time, but that is a question for later. For now, Vergil must come to terms with the idea of his own defeat by Mundus and eventual death at his brother’s hand. 

Twenty-four years is a long time for Dante to have lived without him. Vergil cannot even begin to imagine what it must have been like, when the ten years they had spent apart as children, and the one that Vergil had chosen to impose of his own accord after their reunion, had been worse than what Vergil imagined death to be. 

His brother must have suffered terribly. Vergil can see it written poignantly in the lines of Dante’s body and across his face. 

“I believe you,” Vergil finally says, breaking the silence.

Dante’s eyes rip up from the blanket to meet his, glistening with unshed tears. “You do?”

His brother does not even attempt to hide his fear, as though he is terrified of what Vergil will choose to do. Perhaps he believes that, despite knowing what fate holds for him, Vergil will still blindly march towards it. 

It is difficult for Vergil to see his brother so broken.

He sighs, and extends an arm out towards Dante. 

Whether Dante is nineteen or forty-three, he will always be Vergil’s little brother. 

“Come here,” he says, and Dante immediately launches himself at him, his arms wrapping tightly around Vergil’s neck as he buries his face in its curve.

“Please, Vergil,” Dante whispers, his voice strained. For a moment, he does not sound like he is twenty-four years older. Instead, he sounds far younger than his nineteen year old body — achingly so. “I can’t lose you again. I can’t.” 

“You won’t, Dante,” Vergil murmurs quietly in acquiescence, and his brother shudders with relief in his arms. 

He is still determined to gain enough power to defeat Mundus, but he has decided that perhaps he might need to revise his plan. After all, he is now holding in his arms the living proof that his original plan had failed. 

Vergil will not fail again. 

He cannot afford to do so. 

*

For some time, they lie in bed together without speaking a word. They speak instead through the quiet yearning in their touches, in the way they hold one another, as if relearning the way their bodies mold against the other as they did in the womb. 

Mostly, they listen. To the breathing in the silence, to the susurration of blood beneath their veins. To all that still remains unspoken, lingering in the air like motes of dust at daybreak. 

Tell me about your life without me, Vergil finally says at some point, and after a lengthy pause and a sigh of resignation that sounds too old coming out of a body so young, Dante does. 

He doesn’t start with the fall, because the fall was not the true beginning. It was instead, the beginning of the end, and you never start a story at the end. Or at least, you’re not supposed to. 

The art of storytelling was passed down. It was part of their heritage, preserving memory through the telling. Their mother used to tell them stories when they were quite young. She was a fantastic storyteller who could make anything come alive with words. It was how she had met their father; how he had fallen in love with her, she said. He loved her stories so much that he never wanted to stop listening to them, and eventually, they began to make new stories together. 

Between the two of them, it was Vergil who had inherited his mother’s love for storytelling. He would spend hours reading, which Dante never understood because he wanted to make new stories with his brother instead of reading someone else’s. He liked listening to his mother’s stories because they were hers, and so her stories belonged to them as well. But stories that did not belong to him were not ones Dante cared much about — certainly not the way Vergil did. 

He never thought the day would come that he would ever tell his own story. He thought he would take it to his grave, along with the love that had shaped it. But he owes it to Vergil to tell him what he never told him before, now that they have been given this second chance to make sure their story doesn’t end at the edge of a cliff.

He starts at the beginning of it all — the day when the sky burned and they lost everything they had ever loved. It was in the middle of the afternoon on a beautiful, sunny day in April. The flowers were just coming back in bloom, and the world was reemerging from hibernation. 

“I was playing in the sitting room when it happened,” says Dante as he stares up at the ceiling. “The hell gate opened up outta nowhere and the next thing I knew, there was an entire fuckin’ army of demons pouring through. I tried to fight them, y’know. But Rebellion was a little too much for me at the time.” 

He barely had the strength to even lift it — the sword Sparda had said was his birthright. One day, you’ll master this weapon, his father had told him, though at the time, Dante didn’t know how that would be possible, when the sword was nearly three times his size. 

“I guess one of ‘em must’ve knocked me out. Mother found me and put me in the wardrobe — you remember the one.” It was Dante’s favorite hiding place whenever they played hide-and-seek. He liked it because Vergil always found him without fail. It was where he felt safe, protected. If only because he knew his brother would always find him there. 

“Now that I think about it, I’m not sure why Mother stuck me in there. The whole damn house was already on fire. I guess she was more scared about the demons finding me than she was about the fire. But I think what she was most scared about was that she wouldn’t be able to find you, too. Y’know… she tried to save you. She went lookin’ for you and kept searching and searching… until it killed her.” 

The short, sharp inhale of breath his brother takes tells Dante everything he had suspected all along — Vergil didn’t know their mother had gone looking for him as well. He must have believed that he was left behind; that their mother had only saved Dante, without ever having tried rescuing her firstborn son. He never knew that their mother had given up her life in search of him, if only because Dante never told him. Until now.

“How did you survive?” Vergil asks tensely.

“I have no idea,” says Dante. “I shoulda died in that fire, but I guess I got lucky. The fire never reached me, but the smoke knocked me out. When I woke up, it was already over.” 

He scrambled out of the wardrobe to discover the burnt-out ruin of their home and their mother lying crumpled on the floor in a puddle of blood. She looked like she was just sleeping — her eyes were closed, her lips slightly parted. But there were terrible gashes along the front of her chest, and no matter how much Dante shook her, she never opened her eyes again.

He had wanted to stay with her, but a demon found them, and Dante had to run away.

“I tried looking for you too...but I never found you.” 

Everywhere he looked, people were dying or already dead. There were too many demons to kill and Dante wasn’t strong enough to fight them. He walked through a city that was more dead than it was alive, looking for a brother who didn’t seem like he wanted to be found. He looked everywhere he could — in all of their favorite places to play, and all the ones they didn’t much like. But all that he found were bodies. Men slashed apart. Women lying dead in the street. Children ripped to pieces. A flowering meadow strewn with the dead and the dying, and Dante was the only thing living. 

“Found a part of you, though,” he says quietly, as his brows pinch together. “It was in the graveyard. Your shirt.” 

He smelled it before he saw it — the unmistakable scent of his brother’s blood, which he knew more intimately than his own. He was drawn to it with an animal magnetism, finding it among the weeds growing around an old headstone. There it was — a splash of white across the blood-soaked earth. When Dante lifted it, he saw that it was in tatters. And stained with his brother’s blood. 

“I thought you were dead.” 

His brother’s arms tighten around him, and Dante shudders lightly when Vergil’s fingers stroke through his hair soothingly.

“I thought you were, too,” says Vergil. “I also tried to look for you, even after I… found Mother. I searched for days, but I could not find you. Where were you?” 

“Mother told me that if she never came back, I had to run. She told me to change my name. To forget my past, and start a new life somewhere else.” 

The streets were running with blood when Dante returned to the smoldering ruins of the place he once called home. He carefully snuck past the demons that loitered in the front yard and crept down into the cellar where their father’s armory had crumbled. Beneath a pile of rubble, he found Rebellion and a portrait of their mother, which was all of the past he could carry with him as he escaped from the burning city at night. 

He walked for hours, dragging Rebellion behind him in his arms. 

“I went to Capulet. Lived in an alley behind a pizza joint for a while,” Dante says with a bitter smile. “The old man runnin’ the place took pity on me when he found out that I was livin’ on scraps from the dumpster.” 

It was raining when he was discovered, after he had spent a week cowering beneath a ratty piece of cardboard, clutching Rebellion and his mother’s portrait in his arms. He hadn’t properly slept in days. Anytime he closed his eyes, all he could see was the burning, and all he could smell was his brother’s blood. He kept hearing his mother’s scream echoing and echoing, and all the while, he hid beneath a piece of cardboard, wedged between two dumpsters. 

His stomach gnawed at him like there was a demon inside him trying to claw its way out. It was a thing with sharp teeth that ate at him until he couldn’t take it any longer, and Dante had to crawl out from under his cardboard shelter into the dumpster, where he found leftover pizza that made the stomach-demon quiet for some time. 

It was on one such excursion that he was discovered. 

He was trying to crawl up into the dumpster, and was carefully balancing on the ledge when a gravelly voice came out of nowhere. He was so surprised that he almost fell over.

“Well, what do we have here?” 

Dante whipped his head around and found himself looking at a kindly old man with a balding head and a large belly. He had ruddy cheeks and a large nose, and looked at him with amused curiosity. He was holding a bag of garbage and wearing an apron that was smudged with flour and tomato, and Dante stared at him like he wasn’t sure if he was really human. 

“You gotta be the biggest rat I ever seen, if I gotta say so myself,” said the man. 

“I’m not a rat,” said Dante, the words coming out strangely because they were the first words he had said in a week and his tongue must have started to rust from lack of use in his mouth. 

“Sure look like it. Diggin’ about in a dumpster like that.” 

Dante said nothing. The man had a point, after all. Rats dug around in dumpsters. Boys weren’t supposed to do anything like that at all. If Vergil knew, he probably would be completely grossed out. But Vergil was gone, and Dante was all alone, and he was hungry.

“Jeez, you’re a sorry sight, aren’t ya, kid?” The man frowned as he came closer. His face looked concerned, like he didn’t know what to make of all the dried rust stains that were caked onto Dante’s clothes. “Where are your parents?” 

Dante stared sullenly at the man.

The man looked at him for a long time, as if trying to decide what to do with him. “You come on down, now. A dumpster’s no place for a kid. Why don't ya come inside, and I’ll fix you something to eat?” 

Dante’s stomach growled loudly at the thought of eating a fresh meal which wasn’t cold pizza that he’d dug out of the dumpster. But he didn’t know this man, and his mother had always said to beware of strangers, so instead of jumping down and following the man into the shop, he jumped back between the two dumpsters instead and stubbornly pulled the cardboard over his head. 

“Go away! Leave me alone!” 

“Hey, this ain’t a place for a kid like you!” 

“I’m fine!” 

The man tried to reach between the dumpster for him, but the spot was too tight and he couldn’t really get between them. Dante yelled and kicked at him wildly when his hand came too close, hoping he would go away and just leave him alone. 

The hand withdrew.

“Jeez, kid! What the hell are ya, a wild animal?!” 

The man scowled at him through the crack between the dumpsters.

“Fuck off!” 

“Hey! That ain’t any way for a kid to talk! Didn’t your mother ever teach you not to use bad words?” 

His mother wasn’t around anymore to tell him not say bad words. She was lying in a pool of her blood and she would never open her eyes again, and it was all Dante’s fault because he was too small and too scared, and all he could do was hide. 

“My mother’s dead,” said Dante, and then he started to cry. 

“Aw, kid...I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that,” said the man quietly. For a little while, they sat there in the rain while Dante cried into his dirty knees and the man just looked at him, as if trying to decide what to do. Eventually, the man went away. When he came back, he had a pizza box with him. 

“I made you a pizza,” said the man. “I dunno what kinda fixings you like, so I just put ‘em all on. Ran outta olives though, so you’re just gonna have to make do.” 

He opened the lid of the pizza to show Dante, who was so startled by the sight that he stopped crying. 

The pizza was steaming lightly in the cool air. It had peppers and pepperoni and sausage and onions and mushrooms. 

Dante’s stomach-demon gave a growl. He was still a little suspicious of the man, but he was too hungry to care all that much. 

“My name’s Giacomo, but you can call me Uncle Ciacco,” said Giacomo with a kind smile. “You decide you want more pizza or want somewhere warm to sleep, just come inside.” 

Dante waited until Giacomo left before he crawled out of his hiding spot and grabbed the pizza. He ate the whole thing in one sitting, trying to fill the emptiness inside of him with warm, greasy, savory pizza that only ended up making his stomach hurt because he ate too much of it. 

Giacomo kept bringing him pizza until one day, Dante finally emerged from beneath the cardboard. The old man stared at the massive sword Dante had clutched in his arms but he said nothing about it. 

His eyes looked sad when he looked at him. 

“Do you have a name?” 

Dante shook his head. 

“Where are you from?” 

“Red Grave City,” said Dante, and Giacomo’s eyebrows shot up his forehead. 

“Red Grave City, huh?” Giacomo repeated. His eyes had the look of a man who seemed to know quite a lot. But he didn’t share his knowledge with Dante. Instead, he crouched down before him and looked him right in the eye. “Well, I can’t very well call you ‘kid’ forever, can I?” 

Dante shrugged. 

Giacomo looked him over carefully, and then he smiled. “Tony,” he said. “You look like a Tony. I guess I’ll just have to call you that. What do ya say, kid?” 

“Tony?” Dante rolled the new name over his tongue. He didn’t much like it, but he didn’t not like it either. He guessed it was as good as a name as any, since it wasn’t like he could very well call himself by his true name anymore. That name had to be buried, along with the past his mother told him to leave behind. 

“Yeah. Tony Redgrave,” said Giacomo with a sage nod. “Got a nice ring to it.” 

Dante thought that if he could become Tony, become someone else, someone who was not himself, someone who never lost the other half of his soul or his mother or his father or the only home he had ever known, maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much. Maybe he wouldn’t feel like he had his heart torn out and all that remained was a hole inside of him that could never be filled. Maybe he wouldn’t know emptiness that was too large for someone so small, because Tony was someone who wasn’t him. 

He tried to bury himself like he had buried his brother’s shirt in that cold, bloody graveyard, and for eight years, he lived as Tony Redgrave. For eight years, he tried to become someone he wasn’t, someone who was mercenary and ruthless, who tried hard not to form attachments or care about anything other than the job. 

Vergil scoffs fondly with incredulity at the thought. “You, incapable of caring? What a strange delusion you had, brother.” 

“Yeah, well, you can’t blame me for trying,” says Dante with a wry, brittle smile. “Can’t say it worked though, despite my best damn efforts.” 

They all died in the end, every single one of them. Uncle Ciacco and his daughter Marie, who had taken him in out of the goodness of their hearts. All the mercenaries Dante had begrudgingly started to give a shit about who hung out at Bobby’s Cellar. Grue and his daughter, who Dante had tried so desperately to save. _Nell._

It was like death followed him everywhere he went, and it didn’t really matter that he had tried to bury his past, because in the end, the demons always found him and called him by his true name and then the city would burn. Eventually, Dante realized that the past could never die, even if he didn’t feel like he was really alive. 

“And then you found me again,” says Dante quietly. “You know what happened after that.” 

“Ah, yes,” says Vergil thoughtfully, as his fingers gently card through Dante’s hair. “I do.” His fingers pause the same way Vergil had always done whenever he was turning something over in his mind. Usually, it would be followed by something profound, something that always shook Dante to his core, and so he braces himself for what he knows is surely coming, and his brother certainly doesn’t let him down. 

“You cannot imagine the joy I felt when I discovered that you were still alive,” says Vergil, and all Dante can think is _you’re wrong_. Because he had felt that joy as well, the moment he saw his brother once more. It was so immediate and overwhelming that it was almost enough to make him forget himself and where he was — standing knee-high in a sea of demon blood, in the catacombs below the city. He had been so elated by the sight of his brother, by the knowledge that he was truly alive, that he hadn’t thought to ask himself why Vergil was even there to begin with. All he knew was that his other half hadn’t died all those years ago, and his heart sung as loudly as his blood, every atom and molecule of his being shuddering with raw delight. 

Oh, yeah. He definitely knew that joy. 

“I wanted to run to you the moment I knew the truth, so that I could behold your face once more, and have you in my arms,” Vergil continues as the faintest whisp of a smile slips across his mouth. “To think — my little brother was alive, and in the same city as me, no less.” 

“You could’ve come to me any time. Why didn’t you?”

Dante feels the tension that flows through his brother’s body and into his own. It’s tight and coiling and dark, and he almost immediately regrets having opened his stupid mouth. It’s rare that Vergil ever opens up, and instead of letting him speak, Dante’s just done the one thing that might make his brother shut down and withdraw. He waits for the inevitability of Vergil pushing him away, but to his surprise and great relief, his brother sighs instead. 

“Dante, you must understand that I have spent every waking moment of my life since I lost you and Mother seeking a way to destroy the demon who had destroyed our family. Father had entrusted me to protect you both, but…” Vergil trails off as his brows draw together, and Dante feels the sharp pang of guilt that strikes his brother as deeply as though it were his own. “I was too weak and useless to protect anyone. I could not even protect myself.” 

“Vergil, you were _eight.”_

“I still should have been able to fight. But I lacked the necessary power. In the end… I was alone. My only choice was to survive.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The idea of "eternal recurrence" is that the past will continue to repeat itself, and so expect to see a lot more moments of their respective pasts repeated, through memory or through their own telling of it. 
> 
> \---
> 
> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Please leave a comment/review or kudos if you enjoyed it -- comments and feedback in particular would be greatly appreciated! 
> 
> A huge thank you to [sootandshadow](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/sootandshadow) and [vorokis](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/vorokis) for beta reading and editing and helping me with ideas! <3 
> 
> A special thanks to [Auntarctica](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/auntarctica) as always, as my depiction of Vergil is unquestionably influenced by hers. 
> 
> If you liked what you read and would like to follow me on social media, you can find me on Tumblr [@subtextually](http://subtextually.tumblr.com) or on Twitter [@sub_textually](http://www.twitter.com/sub_textually).
> 
> You can also join me in the [Spardacest Discord Server](https://discord.gg/8X5nVW3) where there are 300+ of us!


	4. Chapter 4

“I recall it was a very beautiful day. It was warm and sunny, and I had wanted to take a little bit of air and sun by myself, and spend some time reading uninterrupted. We had quite a terrible quarrel earlier that morning.”

“Yeah… I remember. It was cuz you didn’t want to share your book.” 

“Ah, is that how you remember it?” Vergil’s smile is thin and wan, but there is no coldness in it. If anything, it is faintly steeped in regret. His brother must have forgotten how he had found Vergil some time after their morning lessons, sitting in the window in the great room with a copy of _The Iliad._

Dante had burst into the room, cheeks flushed and smelling of the spring sun with bits of grass in his hair. He had their practice swords with him in his arms, and his knees were a little scuffed, as though he had taken a tumble outside. He marched right up to Vergil, happy and excited and chattering about the new move that he wanted to demonstrate. 

Only, Vergil wasn’t particularly interested in entertaining his brother’s need for an audience. At least, not at that particular moment, when the thrill of Achilles dragging Hector’s battered body around the walls of Troy commanded his attention. Maybe later, he had promised him, but Dante was relentless, impatient, uncompromising. He wanted Vergil’s attention; he wanted it at that very moment, and he would not leave until he had it, even if it meant destroying his only obstacle, which was Vergil’s book.

Vergil found his beloved book ripped out of his hands, and after a ruthless tug-of-war over the tome, he was dismayed to find it ripped in half, the spine broken, pages loosely fluttering through the air. 

Had he known what was coming, he never would have been so cruel to say what he did then — words that struck his brother hard and made Dante’s eyes fill with tears, made him hurl the practice swords at Vergil with an angry shout, along with the pages he still had clutched in his small hands. That made his little brother turn and run away, leaving Vergil to fume silently as he gathered together the pages of his broken book, picked up Yamato, and proceeded to take some much-needed time apart from his brother to cool down outside. 

“I don’t even remember what you said anymore,” says Dante. “I probably forgot it the moment the demons came.” 

“I told you that I wished you had never been born,” says Vergil quietly, the words coming out of him quite pained and clenching in his chest upon utterance. Even now, he is filled with regret when he thinks of how effortlessly cruel he had been. “Those were the last words I said to you before we were separated.” 

“ _Ouch._ ” 

“Of course, I didn’t mean it. How could I have? You were my other half. I could never imagine a world without you; and if there ever was one, then I thought it would only be hell.” Vergil is not looking at Dante when he says this, so he does not see the way his brother’s expression softly breaks like waves against jagged rocks. But he does feel the chord of regret that the word strikes, the crescendo of it reverberating within his brother, whose emotions simmer so closely to the surface that they seep out of him like leaks in a dam. 

Dante has never been talented at mastering his emotions; they master him instead. When he is angry and he rages, his fury burns hotter than the sun, more volatile than any volcano. When he is happy, his ebullience is as endless as his incandescent smile is bright. When he loves, it is all-encompassing, all-consuming. Overwhelming, like everything else that defines him. 

Once, Vergil had thought it was his brother’s love that he had to fear, for it was the only thing in the universe that made him weak — love, and all that he would do to protect it. The only human part of him he could not carve out of himself, no matter how many times he tried. 

He realizes now how wrong he was. Love cannot kill a man, but grief can destroy him. 

Of all the emotions that rule his brother, it is Dante’s sadness that seems most dangerous of all. It comes on without any warning — a surge of grief and pain and hurt so raw and intense, it is impossible to escape its pull. 

“I was right,” Vergil says softly as he grips Dante close. “It was hell.” 

He remembers he was piecing together the pages of his book when the sky turned red. It had been a perfectly clear day, without even a single cloud in the sky, when suddenly, darkness fell across the land. A dark gash slashed open in the sky above their home, demonic fire spreading like infernal blood that poured from an open wound, bleeding out demons. 

Vergil could see them from where he stood, an endless dark horde of creatures both large and small — skeletal beings wielding scythes; flying monstrosities that dripped with rotten ichor whose shrieks carried the fires of the underworld; large, hulking armored demons that foamed at the mouth and slavered after human blood. 

“My only thought was that I had to protect you and Mother, but I did not yet have the skills I do now. I was a child, and my legs could only run so fast.” 

By the time he had started to make it up the hill, the entire house was already engulfed in flame. Demons spilled out endlessly, a malevolent swarm that Vergil soon found himself fighting against. But he could not seem to kill them fast enough — they kept coming, one after the other.

“I tried to fight, and killed as many as I could, but there were too many.” 

He fought his way up the hill, only to be driven back down again and again — Sisyphus pushing a rock too large for him to move. Eventually, he lost ground completely, and was pushed away from the hill and across the playground where he had once made up countless games to keep his little brother happy and entertained, across the green meadow with the tiny white flowers that were just coming into bloom, to the graveyard which lay as quiet and as foreboding as an incoming storm. 

It was there that Vergil made a stand, the horde descending upon him like a swarm of locusts, tearing off his shirt and clawing into his soft, unarmored flesh. He had known pain before — he had known it quite intimately, even at that age, at the hands of his little brother. But there was no pain that could match the pain of watching his home burn in the distance with his little brother and mother trapped inside, while he was unable to stop it. He could not even stop a lesser demon from carving out parts of him he could not protect. He was not strong enough. He was not powerful enough. He was weak and useless and his humanity hung on him like the chains that bound Prometheus to Zeus’s rock.

He felt his smallness then, for the first time. 

How very weak he was. How soft his flesh. How lacking.

He could not get away, nor he could defend himself as the fighting surged to the end of the graveyard, and he tumbled backwards over a small stone angel and landed hard with his back against a tombstone. It was here that he was run through with a sword that, for once, did not belong to his brother. It had all the infernal fury but none of his brother’s warmth, none of the heat that defined his battles with Dante, and certainly none of his love. It was cold and terrible and aching and soon Vergil found himself impaled by countless swords. He spat up blood, thick and viscous, and looked up at the sneering, malevolent faces of the demons who looked down upon him triumphantly. 

Was this it? Vergil wondered deliriously, his fingers desperately reaching for Yamato, which had fallen out of his hand and lay in the grass just beyond. He could not die, not here, not when it was his duty to protect his family, when he still had to fight his way back to his home. He had to save his mother, his brother. He could not die. He refused to.

“It is done,” said one demon and all at once, they withdrew their swords and Vergil’s blood gushed out of him like water from a broken dam. The world went dark and quiet and all Vergil could see, as the burning world faded from his eyes, was his little brother’s smiling face. 

“By the time I came to, the demons had moved on. They must have thought me dead, but our father’s blood healed me. I immediately ran home, but… I was too late.” 

Their home was engulfed in flame. The heat of it was blisteringly unforgiving, like the sun itself had descended. Everything was burning, and the smoke was noxious and choking. Vergil called out for Dante, for his mother, screaming his throat raw. He ran around the burning building until he found a point of entry and tore inside, unmindful of the way the floor burned through his shoes and scorched the soles of his feet. 

Inside, white-hot fire licked across every surface, devouring everything Sparda had built with a ravenous fury. 

Vergil could scarcely breathe. He coughed terribly, near-blinded with the smoke and heat, which seemed to scorch the moisture right out of his eyes. He staggered through the burning halls, desperation forcing his voice through a throat that felt made of broken glass, choking out his brother's name, screaming for his mother. The only answer he received was the roar of the fire. 

He could not even feel his brother’s presence. 

For the first time in his life, Vergil felt fear. It was an emotion unlike any other, the way it gripped him, the coldness of it coming down in an avalanche until he was smothered beneath its dreadful weight. He called for Dante over and over, his lungs frantically trying to breathe, trying to heal even as the heat of the air burned him with each breath. 

It was in the kitchen where he found their mother. She lay unmoving in a pool of blood so hot that it was boiling. Vergil knew before he even reached her that she was dead. He stared in shock, in disbelief, unwilling to accept the sight in front of him. He tore across the floor and collapsed by her side, calling for her, touching her soft skin, pressing her gentle hand against his face, his tears evaporating in the heat before they could touch his cheeks. 

“I’m sorry,” he said over and over, sobbing as he gripped his mother’s hand, and pressed her palm against his lips. He sat there with her as the world burned, in a stupor of grief, and that was when the fear suddenly returned, this time more violent than before. 

_Dante._

“I tried to look for you then. I looked everywhere. But you were gone, and soon… I found myself overcome by the flames. My only choice was to escape.” 

He could not even return to their mother’s side to pull her out of their burning home. The fire had grown too great, the path back to her rendered impossible. All Vergil could do was crawl out of the fire himself, and watch as the conflagration tore through their home and through their mother, and he hated himself, hated his humanity, his terrible weakness, his foolishness for ever believing himself to be strong enough to protect his family. 

“It wasn’t your fault,” Dante insists quietly, but the words fall between them like rocks sinking to the bottom of a river. Vergil pulls away from them, from his brother’s attempt to vindicate him of his crime for having been born without enough strength to protect all they held dear. He rises from the bed and walks to the window, gazing out at the silent world below. 

There is movement across the way: Dante’s friend, lying in wait on a rooftop on the other side of the street. Vergil cares little for her presence. He also cares little for Dante’s naive declaration. Of course his brother would not understand. 

“Vergil,” Dante says with some urgency, the sheets rustling as he sits up. Vergil can feel his brother’s eyes upon him, the carefully guarded way he studies him. Not long ago, Dante would not have hesitated to chase him to where he stood and wrap his arms around him. But his brother is no longer the brother he remembers. The way he still has not moved from the bed only reminds him of that — of yet another failure, another defeat, all because he was and is too weak.

“You don’t understand, brother,” says Vergil. 

“Then explain it.” 

“You wouldn’t understand. You are incapable of it.” 

The words are spark to dormant embers. Dante ignites, suddenly and without warning, the heat of his anger familiar and comforting. Ah, Vergil thinks to himself, as he turns to look at his brother and reads in the tense lines of his body the barely held-back storm of emotion that brews in his eyes and grits in his jaw. Some things apparently never change.

Whether he’s nineteen or forty-three, Dante’s indignation is the same. 

What isn’t the same: the way Dante has learned to weaponize his words. 

“Try me. I’m not nineteen anymore, Vergil,” he spits out venomously. “That shit-for-brains little brother you remember? He died a long fuckin’ time ago. You’d be surprised what I’m capable of now. Twenty-four years is a long fuckin’ time to learn how to be _capable.”_

Vergil tenses all over and goes quite still. His eyes ice over. His breath arrests in his throat. He had not expected it, to hear it said in such a way. Died a long fucking time ago, Dante said. Died. Putting a word to the truth Vergil had not dared to name: his little brother is dead. He died the moment this stranger of a brother came crashing into Vergil’s present, which was Dante’s past. He died before Dante ran himself through with Vergil’s sword. Before he clutched him and begged him to take him to hell. 

Vergil had been willing to sacrifice everything to save that brother. And here is his phantom now, living within his brother’s body, looking at him with eyes that are hollow and dark and empty in a way his little brother’s never were. 

Vergil feels something shatter apart within him. Something that had been very precious and dear and bright and shaped around his love for his little brother. The pain of it is so sudden and intense, so shocking, that Vergil is blindsided by it. From the look on Dante’s face, his brother is as well. The anger that had been there just a moment earlier has suddenly snapped into alarm, seguing quickly into a brow weighed down by guilt and regret.

“Vergil—” Dante breathes out, his voice sounding a bit choked. “I didn’t mean—” 

Vergil crushes the emotions within him brutally. He forms himself into a glacier. He closes up like the moon blinking out of the sky, and turns without a word. He walks to the bed and picks up Yamato, ignoring the way his brother calls his name fearfully. The distance between the bed and the door is only four feet. He crosses it instantly and has his hand on the handle of the door when the shock of Dante slamming against his back suddenly freezes him. Every muscle in his body tenses and Vergil’s fingers flinch around Yamato. 

“Don’t do this,” Dante whispers behind him. He is shaking. His fingers grip him with the same desperation they had on the cliff. “Please.” He pauses, as though searching for the right thing to say. Vergil can feel his brother’s forehead pressing tight against him, between his shoulder blades. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have lost my shit like that.”

He’s sorry. Yet another reminder that the little brother Vergil remembers truly is dead. His little brother was never sorry for anything. He had too much pride to humble himself enough to ever say the word. And yet, Dante is now trembling with fear, like he does not know if he will be forgiven, and Vergil cannot deny the regret he feels rolling off him in waves. 

Vergil takes a steadying breath and wills himself to relax. 

“Dante,” he says very quietly, raising one hand up after a moment to curl around his brother’s forearm. “There are some things you will never be able to understand, even if I tried to explain it to you. Because you do not know what it is like to be held wholly responsible by Father. You have never been duty-bound to anyone other than yourself. Nor do you know how it feels to have failed in your duty because you were too weak.” 

Dante does not interrupt him this time. He listens quietly, accepting Vergil’s words without argument. If he disagrees, he does not say. 

“You also could never possibly understand… how it feels to be your older brother.” Vergil’s voice is a little softer now. “There are no words that can explain it.” There is nothing in this universe that can describe the depth of his devotion, what Vergil would be willing to do to keep his brother safe. He would burn the whole world down, and himself along with it, if it meant protecting Dante. How could Dante ever possibly understand? Even with twenty-four years between them, there is a fundamental truth his brother will never fully grasp: that Dante is everything to Vergil. That Vergil would give up everything for him. All to keep him safe. All to keep him protected. 

And he would be, once Vergil was invincible, ruling over the world below and the one above that his brother had chosen. He would never be defeated, would never lose Dante again. Not if he were the strongest being in the known universe. Not if he were a god.

Vergil turns in Dante’s arms and looks at his brother, whose eyes are downcast, his face sorrowful and penitent. He suddenly looks far older than the body he resides in. Vergil can see it clearly now — the years that have weighed upon his little brother from the future, wearing him down until all his shine had eroded away. 

“I can never explain it to you fully,” says Vergil. “But I can finish telling you my story, if you still wish to hear it.” 

Dante raises his eyes to him and he nods. “Of course I want to hear it.”

“Very well.” Vergil leads Dante to the small circular table near the window. His brother pulls a blanket off the bed and wraps it around himself, before he sits down in one of the chairs. Vergil does not join him. Instead, he directs his attention back out the window, gazing upon the rubble of yet another failure in the distance. 

“I’m not sure how long I remained outside our home, watching it burn. I don’t think it was too long, because I soon started to search for you. I refused to believe that you had died in that fire, and wanted desperately to believe you had somehow escaped.” 

He searched everywhere for Dante, calling out his brother’s name. He waded through rivers of blood and dug beneath mountains of bodies and rubble. There were so many dead. So many children. Boys just like himself and Dante, lying like broken dolls in the street, inside buildings, hanging off trees. 

For days, he searched without rest, without taking any sustenance, refusing to entertain the thought that his little brother might not have survived. He searched until he no longer had any strength left in his battered body and collapsed in a small heap within the detritus of a church. 

It was night and it was unseasonably cold when he was found.

The man’s footsteps had been silent. He seemed to have appeared out of nowhere — strong and regal, silhouetted by the moon. Vergil did not have to look at him to know that he was in the presence of a powerful demon. He could feel it in his blood, the strength that emanated from him. It was not chaotic and dark like the energy of lesser demons; instead, it was a steady whirlpool that spun into itself, drawing in all light that touched it. Nothing could escape its gravity — not even Vergil, who did not even have the strength to stand or unsheath Yamato. 

The demon was tall and humanoid like his father had been. He had dark hair that he tied back from a face that was preternaturally beautiful. A shock of it fell over the demon’s right eye, and Vergil could see that the demon had pointed ears. He wore a smile that seemed sad and gentle.

“Fear not, little one,” said the demon quietly as he crouched down, the weight of his hand falling upon Vergil’s hair. “I will not hurt you.” 

Vergil struggled beneath his hand, lifting an arm up weakly to bat away the touch of affection that this demon had attempted to give him. “Don’t touch me,” he snarls. “And don’t call me that. I’m not _little._ ” 

“If I do not touch you, I will not be able to give you aid,” said the demon. 

“I didn’t ask for it.” 

“And yet, it will still be given, for it is my duty as Sparda’s apprentice, and you are his eldest son.” 

The quiet sound of surprise Dante makes draws Vergil’s attention. His brother has an expression on his face that he is not familiar with. It is strangely closed off, guarded in a way Dante so rarely ever is. Unsettlingly unreadable.

“Was his name Modeus?” 

“Yes, how did you know?”

“I’ve met him.” It’s all Dante says. He doesn’t provide further explanation, but judging by the clouds in his eyes, his acquaintance with Modeus must not have been pleasant. 

“I see.” There is a moment of silence, and then Vergil continues. “In any case, Modeus was determined to take me into his care, but I was still determined to find you.”

That night had been bitterly cold, but Vergil had hardly felt it, even as his entire body trembled. There was only one feeling he could focus on, one thought which drove all else away: he had to find his little brother, who was surely scared and hungry and alone.

Modeus wanted them to leave the city. It was no longer safe for Vergil to be there. At any moment, the demons might return. 

“Dante,” Vergil said. “My little brother. I must find him. You must help me. We can’t leave without him.”

A cold gust of wind blew through the bowels of the ruined church. Modeus did not move. He only looked down at Vergil with a quietly mournful expression. 

“I beg you. Help me find my brother,” Vergil pleaded.

“My young lord,” said Modeus carefully. “Your brother… is gone.” 

For a moment that stretched like an eternity, Vergil felt nothing — not the wind that scraped against his skin, not the breath that froze in his lungs, not the blood within his veins. He was completely empty of all feeling, carved out of air. When it returned, it was with a vengeance. A fury that snapped up, claws out within him. “No,” he snarled. “ _No._ I refuse to believe it. We must find him. I can’t lose him! I won’t!” 

“Lord Vergil—” 

“You will find him for me. _You will find him._ I command it!” 

The panic within him was wild in a way Vergil had never before felt. It was alive and breathing fire in his lungs and shot through him with so much adrenaline that he could feel it sizzling through his entire body. It had given him enough energy to struggle up onto his feet, and now he was staring down at Modeus. 

But his father’s apprentice did not move despite the order; he only looked at him sadly, and Vergil wanted to slash the expression off his face with Yamato.

“Lord Vergil,” Modeus said again, this time a little more softly. “I have served Lord Sparda for many thousands of years. I have always been able to sense his blood, which is how I found you. Your brother… seems to have perished in the fire. You are the only blood of Sparda that still survives here. And if we do not leave soon, you may not survive much longer.” 

Modeus went on to tell him about a safehouse somewhere, but all Vergil could hear was the roar of blood in his ears. He thought of his little brother who was all the light in his world. His beautiful little brother, who crept into his bed at night whenever he was scared; who chased after his footsteps because he could never bear to be apart for too long; whose happy laughter was like the rising of the sun and whose lambent eyes were brighter than anything Vergil had ever beheld. His little brother, who was brash and loud and grew wild like the flowers he would collect for their mother every spring; who always wanted Vergil’s attention because there was nothing else in the world he loved more; who wanted everything that was Vergil’s because he didn’t want there to be anything that they didn’t share; whose love was too much, too deep for an eight year old boy like Vergil who did not dare to love as openly or as wildly as his little brother. Who ran away from him crying in the end, because Vergil had said, I wish you had never been born.

And now Vergil was truly alone, the last surviving blood of Sparda, and Dante would never know how much Vergil needed him and loved him and that he never meant it — that he would take back the words if he could and tell him instead that he was everything that was good in the world. Everything that was bright and beautiful. 

Vergil shook as the reality of it finally hit him, and he felt torn apart like a demon had reached inside him and ripped out the living part of him, leaving his chest flayed open. This was a pain that was unlike any other, and Vergil felt he would surely die from it. The agony of it was beyond anything he had ever known, like hell itself had opened up within him and was boiling up in his blood, through his veins, through every atom and molecule of his being, blasting through his soul. It tasted like ash and blood and brimstone, and the scream that rose up from him came out an inhuman roar of rage and pain and endless grief as his humanity tore apart at the seams and his devil finally ripped out of him.

What happened after was a blur. Vergil doesn’t remember much of it at all, only the blinding rage of it. When he came to again, he was lying beneath Modeus’s black coat, and they were on a train clicking away into the night. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Please leave a comment/review or kudos if you enjoyed it -- comments and feedback in particular would be greatly appreciated! 
> 
> A huge thank you to [sootandshadow](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/sootandshadow) and [vorokis](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/vorokis) for beta reading and editing and helping me with ideas! <3 
> 
> A special thanks to [Auntarctica](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/auntarctica) as always, as my depiction of Vergil is unquestionably influenced by hers. 
> 
> If you liked what you read and would like to follow me on social media, you can find me on Tumblr [@subtextually](http://subtextually.tumblr.com) or on Twitter [@sub_textually](http://www.twitter.com/sub_textually).
> 
> You can also join me in the [Spardacest Discord Server](https://discord.gg/8X5nVW3) where there are 300+ of us!


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